We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that, as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh. Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates.
— Henry Gee, Nature, October 5, 2011

Darwin referred to the origin of species as “that mystery of mysteries,” and even today, more than 150 years later, evolutionary biologists cannot fully explain how new animals and plants arise.

Maybe they can take refuge in that phrase, “cannot fully explain” the answer. Maybe they can partly or mostly explain it. The article does not allow that reprieve. It’s even worse than not knowing: things they thought they knew are not true:

For decades, nearly all research in the field has been based on the assumption that the main cause of the emergence of new species, a process called speciation, is the formation of barriers to reproduction between populations….

But now a University of Michigan biologist and a colleague are questioning the long-held assumption that genetic reproductive barriers, also known as reproductive isolation, are a driving force behind speciation.

Rabosky and Matute were “surprised” by the results of their study. Looking at two-thirds of bird species and 9 fruit fly species, they expected to see a correlation between speciation rates and genetic markers of reproductive isolation.

“We found no evidence that these things are related. The rate at which genetic reproductive barriers arise does not predict the rate at which new species form in nature,” Rabosky said. “If these results are true more generally — which we would not yet claim but do suspect — it would imply that our understanding of species formation is extremely incomplete because we’ve spent so long studying the wrong things, due to this erroneous assumption that the main cause of species formation is the formation of barriers to reproduction.”

They said evolutionists’ “understanding” is not just incomplete, but “extremely incomplete.” Another example cited on Evolution News & Views shows that foraminifera do not fit the reproductive-isolation–speciation pattern. Since speciation and reproductive isolation appear uncorrelated, a “broader definition” of speciation is needed, they said. In addition, so-called ‘speciation genes’ “speciation genes probably play a minimal role in the formation of species,” they said.

All they could do was speculate that maybe most species, after splitting, go extinct, leaving no evidence in the fossil record. The press release from University of Michigan is entitled, “Long-held assumption about emergence of new species questioned.”

Whoops, We Lost Our Evidence

Meanwhile, Darwin’s tree has other problems, Science Daily said: holes. Large portions of work on the “tree of life” have been lost, a paper in PLoS Biology reported, because of lack of data accessibility. “Given that reproducibility is a pillar of scientific research, the preservation of scientific knowledge (underlying data) is of paramount importance,” the authors began, warning that lack of reproducibility and evidential support for the Tree of Life project threatens to label it as “soft science,” putting trust in the word of scientists instead of the actual data:

Perhaps more importantly, we call for a shift in thinking among all evolutionary biologists who rely on the power of phylogenetics to test hypotheses and make inferences. It is crucial for this broad discipline to consider the alignments and phylogenies themselves as key data that require appropriate storage for study reproducibility and data integration.… The biological community has lost most of the alignments and trees underlying the numerous phylogenetic analyses conducted over the past several decades—we should strive to do much better in the years ahead.

Science Daily says that most of the data has been “lost forever” from publications that referred to the data but did not store it so that it could be cross-checked. “There are ambiguities with the alignments, you have to make certain judgment calls, and so an alignment that I do is not going to be the same as an alignment that somebody else does,” lead author Bryan Drew said, based on a study of over 7,000 papers that found “about 70 percent of published genetic sequence comparisons are not publicly accessible, leaving researchers worldwide unable to get to critical data they may need” for their own comparisons.

Can you think of a more pitiful example in the history of science of a majority of eminent scientists believing things that prove not to be true, teaching falsehoods for over a century, and then carelessly losing most of the data that supposedly supports its core beliefs? What a sham that shaman Charlie started. He wrote a book on “the origin of species” but 154 years later, his disciples are still behind Square One! It would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that textbook makers, documentary producers, and educators worship at Charlie’s shrine. The law require that this monstrous “mystery” religion (with its long-standing “mystery of mysteries,” the “origin of species by means of natural selection”), with its racist implications (“the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life”) be taught as fact, fact, FACT in public schools—no alternatives allowed. Not only do they keep going bankrupt and landing in jail on their own Monopoly board, they won’t let anyone else play; whoever tries is persecuted and expelled. If you aren’t yet angry at the damage done by the Charlietans for 154 years, you need to take a refresher course in righteous indignation. One thing you can do about it is spread the outreach of Creation-Evolution Headlines, where we expose these frauds with their own words. They don’t have a data storage problem; they have an integrity problem. Time for regime change.

Creation Scientist of the Month

The Periodic Table of the Elements is one of the great “patterns” in nature discovered by careful, painstaking work in chemistry by many scientists over many years. The one who is most famous for putting the pieces together in a systematic way is our scientist of the month, Dmitri Mendeleev.

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